Welcome to Dystopia Rising
Dystopia Rising is a full immersion live-action game, set in a post-apocalyptic zombie infested world. For one weekend every month, you will join a settlement of survivors to eat, sleep and fight as your character.
Once a month in over 20 states around the country, hundreds of people come together at their local Dystopia Rising chapter for a full weekend immersive experience from Friday night to Sunday afternoon. During that time, you'll play a character completely of your own creation within the world of Dystopia Rising, where you'll explore a living world with elements similar to tabletop/video games, improv theater, haunted house/escape room, and wasteland weekend type experiences.
WE'RE ALL MAKING IT UP
There is no script for you to follow for our events. Become your character--do what they would do in any situation you find yourself in. Do what you think is going to be interesting and fun for you while keeping in mind the feelings and fun of the players around you. The goal isn't to "win the game (in fact, we highly encourage that you play to lose), but rather to have an exciting adventure and come away with amazing stories to tell.
THIS IS A COLLABORATION
All of our adventures are built cooperatively. The organizers build the basics of the world and the characters, and the participants bring those characters to life through their actions, costumes, and ideas. The story emerges organically from the interactions and cooperation between everyone, with results cooler and wilder than any one of us could create alone! While our characters might oppose each other, as players, we're all friends working together to tell a story.
COMMUNITY AND PEOPLE FIRST
No matter what we review below, the primary point that we want to drive home to you is that this entire network, not just our amazing local event, is a group of people who have decided to spend their weekend together having fun. As you start to dig through all of this, we ask you to join our Facebook Page and Facebook Group to start interacting with those already participating. There are a lot of us and we'd like to get to know you to help make your time at Dystopia Rising an absolute blast.
WHAT WE PROVIDE
A private, full weekend interactive entertainment from Friday at 10pm until Sunday at 12pm
A twin sized bed in an enclosed cabin
Clean and accessible bathrooms and showers
Access to an industrial sized fridge and microwave
A community focused on respect, consent, and positive energy.
WHAT TO BRING
A costume, which can absolutely be as simple as some old clothes you own.
A set of clothes that you don’t mind getting dirty in for your 4 hour volunteer shift
Bedding & Toiletries
Food for the weekend
Adherence to our Policies
An open, creative mind
Looking for a more specific packing list? Check out our What to Bring page.
Don’t see something you’re curious about? Check out our Commonly Asked Questions page
ORIENTATION
At 6:00pm on the Friday of every game, we have two amazing individuals who are specifically dedicated to making sure New Players feel educated on how this all works. At 8:30pm they will walk through a 15-30 minute demonstration and answer any questions you may have before the game officially starts at 10pm.
Basic Game Mechanics
Gathering and Crafting: Dystopia Rising has a large In Game economy with its own currency, raw materials, and crafted goods. There are numerous professions that will allow you to gather raw materials and then many more that will allow you to turn those raw materials into finished goods like armor, weapons, food, and drink. As every profession can learn to defend themselves, we highly encourage you to pick up gathering or crafting skills to flesh out your gameplay experience as this is a living breathing world and you can only solve so many problems with combat. This will be further explained as you dig into what type of character you'd like to play.
Combat: Dystopia Rising utilizes a lightest touch system. With stylized, safety first, foam weapons and soft cloth packets to represent projectiles. Each weapon will have its own damage value that you'll say out loud when you swing the weapon or throw the packet so the person getting hit knows the damage they should take.
Mind Points and Skills: Each Strain of Humanity also has starting mind point. Those are spent to use skills that your character can learn to do things like heal people, avoid the damage from a hit you took, gather materials, and craft items. At Noon and Midnight, your mind points fully refresh. You can read up on all of the skills in coming sections and the full rulebook.
Hit Points, Armor, and Dying: When you choose a Strain of Humanity in the next section, it will tell you how many hit points your character starts with. If you receive damage that reduces your hit points to 0, your character is now dying. When you're dying, you can't move or heal yourself, but you can and should yell and scream, you're dying after all. There are specific items and skills that allow people to heal your hit points. Armor is very similar to hit points, but it requires someone with the skill repair to fix it back to full.
Death: If after 5 minutes of yelling and screaming for help, nobody comes to save you, your character has died. Dying is a big part of Dystopia Rising as this is a Play to Lift and Lose system of storytelling. After you die, you'll head over to our Ops building where the Storytelling team will provide for you an amazing roleplay experience that will explain exactly what happened to your body and help drive the future actions and attitudes of your character.